The Neruda Case (39 page)

C
ayetano stood, astounded, amid the marble floors, crystal lamps, lush drapes, and beveled mirrors of the lobby. The waiter returned to the bar, where outburts from the customers continued to fill the air.

She was, without a doubt, Beatriz, the widow of Bracamonte, the woman he was looking for, the woman the poet had fallen in love with decades earlier in Mexico City. He felt his chest seize up with emotion. This was the same face that appeared in the photo taken outside the Social Club in Santa Cruz, the one he had stolen from the apartment in Berlin. He had studied those features so many times that they were deeply imprinted in his mind. Slender and well groomed, with a determined gaze, Beatriz was still a striking woman.

“The pleasure is mine,” he mumbled, managing to hide his surprise. He extended his hand.

“Will you tell me why you’re looking for me?” she asked. Her eyes searched him; he felt daunted.

“How do you know I’m looking for you?”

“I’ve been hearing about it for some time. Today, for example, you were at my house. I assume you weren’t there to speak to my husband.”

HERE WAS PROOF OF WHAT
he’d guessed all along, he thought with relief. Years ago, in 1969, Tamara Sunkel of La Paz had gone to Santiago de Chile and become Maia Herzen. There was no Maia Herzen. Maia Herzen was Tamara Sunkel, who was the same as Beatriz, the widow of Bracamonte.

“That’s right. It was me.”

“Why are you looking for me?” she insisted, in a serious tone.

“Because I have a message for you,” he replied, smoothing his patterned tie with satisfaction. Now he would be the one to ask questions. Not her. That much he’d learned from Maigret’s conversations with suspects, those slow exchanges in which he drew out details like so many crumbs from the whole loaf of truth. Yes, now it was his turn. Now he would ask about what he really wanted to know: whether her daughter was, in fact, what the poet longed for her to be with all the strength he still possessed—namely, the extension of his own life into future space and time.

“Could you be clearer, please?”

“Maybe if I tell you that you’re still remembered at the school on the shores of Lake Bogensee, you’ll understand me better.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And that in La Paz, an accountant is still waiting for confirmation that a money transfer has been received …”

“Why don’t we go for a ride?” she suggested, keeping her poise. “My car is parked nearby.”

They walked down the steps, and the doorman in marshal’s uniform held the door open for them with a deep bow. Cayetano had the distinct impression that Beatriz was a slippery fish who’d escaped his hands only to appear farther away, in clearer, stiller waters, willing to be caught there and to receive his questions. They got into the Opel parked in front of the hotel. It was a little after midnight. A deceptive
calm had fallen over Santiago, the calm before the storm, Cayetano thought. The woman drove past La Moneda and turned on the Alameda, heading east.

“Have you been to Leipziger Allee in East Berlin?” he asked.

She kept driving as though she hadn’t heard him, then asked, “Whom do you work for, Cayetano?”

The fact that she knew his name sent a chill down his spine, as it meant that she must be a powerful woman. “You can already imagine the answer, or else you wouldn’t have sought me out. First, tell me this: who are you really?”

“You already know that. I’ve been in Chile for several years.”

“But before that you lived in La Paz, where you were a real estate investor, and the companion of a Bolivian officer. Before that, you worked at Bogensee, and before that in Havana. And in the beginning you lived in Mexico City …”

“You see?” She sounded sarcastic. “If you know everything, why ask?”

“Because I see too many discrepancies. What do you actually do for a living?”

The car kept driving east. They drove past the stately building of La Unión Club, and the central headquarters of the University of Chile, where a painted wall called on the people to face down sedition. The road was full of military jeeps. On the grounds of the United Beer Company, a group of workers stoked a bonfire. Their banners proclaimed that the business was in the hands of its workers. As they advanced into the tree-lined neighborhood of Barrio Alto, with its lush gardens, the Chilean capital began to appear less gloomy and desolate.

“I’ve searched for you all over the world, Beatriz. But in the end it was you who found me. It’s an urgent matter: Don Pablo needs to speak with you.”

“Don Pablo?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about. I know you do.”

“I’m not pretending. I haven’t seen him in over thirty years. I know he’s ill.”

“Gravely ill.”

“Why does he need to see me?” Her voice sounded indifferent.

“He only hired me to find you, Beatriz. The rest is not my concern.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I imagine he wants to talk about what happened between you in the forties, in Mexico City …”

“And why would his love for me suddenly rear its head after all this time?”

“You know why.”

“No. I don’t know anything, Cayetano.”

“Because of Tina. Tina Bracamonte.”

“Hold on a moment. Just a moment.” She sounded tense. They were waiting at a red light on Eliodoro Yañez Street. “Don’t come at me now with strange stories. What could he want with Tina?”

“You can imagine what. It’s not for me to comment on this matter.”

She shifted into first gear, and accelerated. She seemed to be losing control over herself, and the car. She turned onto a side street and drove at full throttle; the tires screeched. After a few minutes, they reached the Catholic University, where anti-government banners hung on the walls and students stood guard with helmets and slingshots.

“They’re about to topple the government, and Pablo’s hung up on concerns like these,” she said. “Do you see those right-wing youth who took the university in defense of democracy, claiming Allende is a threat to it? Well, tomorrow, when the military governs with an iron fist, they’ll rush to offer themselves as collaborators. Take a
look at them and don’t forget. Today they’re in their walking shoes, country pants and parkas, crucifixes at their throats, nunchucks in hand. Tomorrow they’ll be in suits and ties to defend the indefensible.”

She sped down the deserted avenue. After passing Plaza Italia, where people waited in line beside bonfires to enter the supermarket when it opened the following day, they arrived at the headquarters of Patria y Libertad, an ochre fortress with boarded windows and doors. On the wall facing the Alameda, an enormous painted black spider menaced the Santiago night.

“The nationalists,” Beatriz said with disdain. A banner hanging nearby proclaimed: “Yakarta Is Coming!” “Today they call themselves patriots, tomorrow they’ll applaud the murder and imprisonment of Chileans. Then they’ll wash their hands like Pontius Pilate. The very worst is about to happen, Cayetano, and Pablo’s expending this much energy to find out about something that happened decades ago?”

He listened to her indignant diatribe: Pablo was clearly the same egotist as ever, and it was far too late to rectify history. At this stage, she said, it didn’t matter what he imagined about their affair. There was nothing left to be done, the die had long been cast, and no one could change the past or what had sprung from it.

Twenty minutes later, they reached the neighborhood of Macul, with its gated Pedagogical Institute, now taken over by leftist students. Bonfires burned on patios, and helmeted night watchmen took shelter on the roofs. A green-and-red MAPU banner hung from a cornice, urging Allende to hold his ground. A red-and-black MIR banner called on the people to rise up and form militias.

“You see those youngsters?” she asked. “All daddy’s boys. Until 1968 they sided with the Frei Montalva government, and at the last minute, when they saw Allende was going to win in 1970, they switched to Unidad Popular. Today they’re ambassadors, ministers, or
investors, and they’re more revolutionary than anyone else, as if they’d always been that way. If things fall apart they’ll be the first to save their own necks, renege everything, and adjust to new times. They’re bourgeois kids playing at revolution to calm their own conscience. It comforts them to know that later their relatives in the church, the military, the justice system, or big business will save them from the mess they got themselves into.”

They headed back toward downtown on bleak, dark streets fraught with potholes and puddles. On one corner, they saw beggars sleeping under cardboard, accompanied by stray dogs. Beatriz had not answered Cayetano’s question. And the more he pressed his case, the more she avoided the issue and instead kept holding forth on the national drama and the poet’s irresponsible egotism.

“He was always that way,” she said again. “He fled Mexico when the time came to clear matters up. He appears again now, when clarification is superfluous, of no use. That’s no way to act, Cayetano.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Beatriz, but you still haven’t told me whether Tina is the daughter of Ángel or the poet,” Cayetano finally said with new resolve. This time, he thought, the fish wouldn’t be able to slip through his hands. The city passed outside the car window as in a black-and-white film. “Do you want to answer, or should I?”

59

I
n the Opel’s headlights, the highway to Valparaíso pushed into the darkness like a saber down the night’s great throat. Beatriz had offered to take him all the way home. They traveled in silence. The drone of the engine provided a backdrop to political commentaries from the airwaves. The crisis had become utterly polarized, extreme, and untenable, with socialist leader Carlos Altamirano proclaiming that if a coup should take place, the left would infiltrate the marines and turn the nation into another Vietnam. Every once in a while they glimpsed blazes stoked by country dwellers demanding ownership of the land they worked on. The news grew even worse: military squads threatened workers at the factories they’d overtaken, the opposition’s statements were becoming more and more seditious, and the response from the left, with the exception of the communists and the president, was becoming increasingly radical in tone.

At that instant, Cayetano’s gaze fell on the Army of Chile badge on the windshield.

“Whose side are you on, Beatriz?” he asked. In the darkness ahead, he saw a soldier positioned at the edge of the highway, and caught the furtive shine of his gun. It made him think of that night
many years before when the poet had glimpsed the murderous wink of Josie Bliss’s dagger through a diaphanous mosquito net.

“Whose side do you think I’m on?”

“Judging by your time in Havana and East Berlin, you should be sympathetic to the Allende government. But if I look at your life in La Paz and Santiago, I see you as committed to the right. You’re a walking contradiction.”

“Things are more complex than you realize, and aren’t always what they seem. You’re young and full of feeling, idealistic to a fault. That’s why you’re helping Pablo find the daughter he wishes he’d had. But life is an iceberg, Cayetano. We can’t see the most essential parts.”